Wielding a long wooden pole, the Right Rev. Francis Michael Stiteler poked at the upper branches of a tall red cedar growing in front of the impressive church at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit near Conyers.

Stiteler, the monastery’s abbot, had stationed us on the other side of the tree to look for a juniper hairstreak butterfly that might fly out from the dark green foliage when the limbs were shaken.

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Charles Seabrook / AJC Special

Abbot Francis Michael Stiteler’s fondness for butterflies, birds and other wild creatures is in keeping with his love for God, he says.

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“If you want to see a juniper hairstreak, cedars are where you look,” said Stiteler, who was leading a butterfly count at the monastery and surrounding areas last weekend.

The sight of the abbot jostling a cedar tree drew curious stares from some visitors strolling the monastery’s grounds. But Stiteler was intent on his mission: He wanted to ferret out the mint-green butterfly so that we could add it to our list of species seen during our day-long survey.

Alas, his tree-shaking produced no juniper hairstreaks, whose caterpillars feed on the red cedar. Later in the day, however, some of the other participants in the count did find a hairstreak — one of 61 species tallied during the survey. The total is a state record, breaking last year’s record of 59 species.

Stiteler beamed about the results. He started the annual count several years ago out of his deep love for butterflies. It also was a matter of convenience: The monastery’s rules don’t allow monks to leave the grounds except with special permission. That made it difficult for him to participate in a butterfly count elsewhere, so he decided to bring a count to the monastery.

Under guidelines set by the North American Butterfly Association, participants in a count scour the landscape in a 15-mile diameter circle, tallying all the butterflies spotted during a single day. Stiteler made the center of his count’s circle a point near the intersection of Ga. 138 and Ga. 212 in Rockdale County. That way, he was able to include the monastery as well as Panola Mountain State Park and Davidson Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve in DeKalb County.

While Stiteler and his team scoured the monastery’s 2,000 acres for butterflies, other parties combed the surrounding areas. My team — which included Rose and Jerry Payne of Musella and Alice Jordon of McDonough — tromped over an old golf course that’s now part of Panola park and being allowed to return to its natural state.

Self-taught birder

Stiteler, 58, grew up in one of 50 row houses on a Philadelphia street. “I don’t remember if there was even a tree on the street,” he said.

Born and raised a Catholic, he strayed from the church but then had a “conversion experience,” mostly from reading the Bible. “It led me back to my faith and to God,” he said.

That, in turn, led him in 1974 to the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, a Roman Catholic community of Trappist monks. “The monastery provided a structure to keep me focused on God,” Stiteler said.

It also helped him develop a deep reverence for nature. “One of the older brothers here gave me an old pair of binoculars and a list of bird species that he had seen, and I started using the binoculars and looking at birds myself, and I grew to love it,” he said.

He had to teach himself. He couldn’t leave the monastery to attend Audubon Society bird walks and other activities where he could learn nature lore from experts. Having to stay at the monastery, though, didn’t mean he was tightly confined — the monastery’s 2,000 acres of old fields, woods and wetlands provided plenty of room to roam. He began keeping a list of the birds he saw there. (It totals 180 species.)

Still, he longed to see and learn more about all the beautiful birds, butterflies, wildflowers and other wild things — “God’s great creation,” he called them — around him.

He found a way to do that by taking jobs that allowed him to leave for a few hours, such as transporting bonsai plants grown at the monastery to a local nursery or picking up supplies. During those trips, “I would swing by Fernbank [Science Center] or stop along the way to do some bird-watching,” he said.

Stiteler said he found God’s love in the beauty, bounty and solitude of nature. “Now I try to tell people how important it is for us to be good stewards, responsible for God’s creation,” he said.

In the sky

The moon will be last quarter on Saturday night. By the end of the week, look for the moon to rise about midnight and set around midday, says astronomer David Dundee of the Northwest Georgia Science Museum. Mercury and Venus are very low in the west just after sunset and will appear close together on Friday evening. Mars is in the northwest just after sunset. Jupiter rises out of the east just before sunset.